on top the cloud beneath the flowers
2019
video installation
single channel video 2 hours, 3 minutes and 41 seconds and one synthetic fabric beanbed.
on top the cloud beneath the flowers
taking the body as her subject, Cam Xanh pulls us intimately close to examine its form as landscape. reminiscent of the moon mission, peaks and troughs of flesh and fabric appear like sand dunes, cavernous mountains, and murky lakes. zooming in and out in slow motion, the camera struggles to react to the reflective material, creating deep shadows and foggy light; the effect highlights the drone-like motion of the camera as it pans across the surface. filmed using an iPhone with its flashlight on, it tests the limitations of the simple phone camera, and alludes to its ubiquity in our daily lives. the video work appears in the exhibition as part of an installation that places the viewer’s body directly at its otherworldly centre. set up like a bad karaoke room, artwork and flesh meet as the viewer sinks down into the sky to look up at the Earth. protruding above from the industrial ceiling, withering bouquets are used to question our relationship to beauty as the artwork draws on flowers’ symbolic qualities of femininity, love and sexuality, and their allure when combined with youth. the dying flowers act as a memento mori and create a distinct, rotting smell, that adds a fouled undertone to the visceral experience of Cam Xanh’s flower market. the innocence of naming girls after flowers, entangled by the artist with the reality of life. to be called a flower girl in Vietnam is also a euphemism for prostitute.
Cam Xanh’s real team of working girls living the beach life sit passively in the video, like flowers in a still life, paused in another temporality. they could be anybody, and the viewer is encouraged to see the body as their own, but rather they are Cam Xanh’s MoT+++ team, each taking the camera from her hands to film one another, leaving only the sound of her voice singing acapella through their headphones. Cam Xanh negates her power as creator and removes herself from the process to allow for spontaneity and idiosyncrasies to enter. a droplet from the iCloud of the digital sphere, the video is a study of relationships between people, between artist and team, the organic and the technological, an individual and a landscape, and an observer and the observed. it presents a mirror to the viewer with which they can question their own standards of beauty and morality.
The video work was part of MoT Doi Gai | A Beach Life is the culmination of Cam Xanh’s close studio in the MoT+++ space.
Often known as the world’s oldest profession, Cam Xanh’s MoT Doi Gai | A Beach Life explores the theme of prostitution at a conceptual level. starting with a quote from Gore Vidal that “we are all prostitutes in one sense or another, ethically if not sexually”, the exhibition goes on to investigate the contemporary relationships between feminism, love and sexuality, art, beauty, power, economics, and the potential for exploitation that emerges at their intersections.